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I believe that Jesus Christ willingly went to death for my sake, and that of other believers; that his death was unjustly ordered by collusion of the Roman Pontius Pilate, the Jewish Sanhedrin, and the Hellenic collaborator King Herod; that he was publicly executed by crucifixion, known to be dead by friend and foe, and buried with official notice and under guard.

Some years before he was my professor for Writers & Fundamentalisms and The Bible and Literary Theory, Dr. David Lyle Jeffrey warned us all:

The seventeenth century–no less than the second century or the twentieth century–abounds in examples of would-be faithful Christians who, lacking the sound hermeneutical basis which comes from apprenticeship to the historic understanding of the faith, combine a very high view of the Bible with extremely naive views of language, text, and (consciously or unconsciously) self-justifying motivations in the individual reader. The results in any time of this kind of epistemological cocktail include a free-wheeling entrepreneurial reading of the Bible–perilous at best, self-serving and, often enough, finally tyrannous at worst. In our own era it has certainly led to widespread confusion of Christianity with “the American way of life.”

I believe Jesus Christ is God being a man, and was already God when the Father sent the Son, and the Spirit fertilized an egg of Mary’s; so that the Son has an actual human body both created in the image of God (as are we all) and genetically linked to his mother; to David; to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; to Noah; and to Adam.

I believe Jesus Christ, the Lord of all believers (we entrust ourselves to Him, agree to cooperate with Him, and know He will transform us), is the same Creator God as the Father and Spirit; yet He is the Son to the Father, Who sends Him to be the Lord of all Creation.

I believe in God the Father, Almighty Creator of all things visible and invisible, near and far, close to Him and close to me.

I believe the Son and the Spirit are this same Creator God.